All Hail Minifig.  For he knows the proper way to pay homage to one as wonderous as myself.

He has rendered me in LEGO.

Although good, it is not perfect – why would I be smiling at a drunk in the street?

Superb – and thanks for all the people who emailed me about this.  You can find much more of his work at his Flickr page.

The thing about wearing a uniform – it really changes your behaviour.

I’m guessing that a lot of you are aware of the Milgram experiment, where members of the public more willingly follow instructions if the instruction giver is wearing a uniform or other symbol of authority (follow the link for a more complete explanation - if you’ve never heard of this experiment, it and the Stamford experiment, make scary reading).

So when I am wearing my uniform I am more confident and can ‘order’ people around.  The police, firefighters and members of the public tend to do what I tell them if there is someone sick around.  Obviously I only use these powers for the force of good, but without my uniform I am a much more shy person.

I noticed this when I went to the Open Rights Group meeting.  When I arrived I knew one person there, and once I’d stopped talking to her I became an instant wall-flower.  It’s something that I need to change and change pretty quickly.

But there is a flip-side to wearing an ambulance uniform, you also become more passive.

If I were in the street and some drunk tried to hit me – I’d punch them on the nose.  If I were verbally abused – I’d soon be ‘in their face’ shouting and ranting along with the best of them.

Yes, I know one paragraph ago I said I was a wall-flower – but this is in a social situation, when my temper is raised it is a terrible thing to behold.

But with the uniform I’ll gently restrain the drunk trying to hit me and I’ll ignore any verbal abuse that is thrown at me.  Unfortunately the anger that I feel is then turned inward, which I am guessing is not a healthy thing to do.

I wonder if it is the uniform, or the risk of having a complaint put in about me that turns me into such a wimp.  It might just be that I spend so much time trying to keep patients calm, that I’m feeling very mellow when people abuse me.

Tomorrow I’ll explain why I started thinking about the way I take abuse without defending myself...

Another fine post from Bill Stickers today, as he writes about saving the life of a driver.

See how far you get through the post before you can guess a diagnosis, Bill’s writing is so clear I guessed what it was once he described the patient.

As I mention in a comment on this post, it’s a good thing that he came along when he did, as without him acting ‘outside of protocols’ the driver would now be dead.  It’s good to see someone making an effort for the sake of another human being.

Congratulations Bill!

This CoComment thing looks very, very interesting and I’d love to get to play with it.  Unfortunately you need to have an invitation code to be invited into the Beta.

Anyone able to help with this?

Update: Thanks to Euan Semple of The Obvious, I now have an invitation. Once I've played around with it for a couple of days I'll let you know all about it.

A while ago I read my posts and published them as podcasts.  It ended up taking too much time and was impossible to do while blogging from work, so I had to stop.

However – if you cast your eyes over to the sidebar you will spot a new icon .  This clever little thingy converts my RSS feed into an audio RSS feed.  Copy and paste that link into your podcaster software and you will get a pretty good computer generated reading of my posts.

If I were clever I’d know how to add a “Listen to this article” link at the bottom of each of my posts – but after spending some time wrestling with the Blogware templates it’s all a bit beyond me…

For anyone who is interested I’ll be at the second Open Rights meeting, although to get to it has meant that I’ve had to spend some of my annual leave to get a night off work.

If you are going, come over and say Hi.